Statistical Significance of Indirect Concept Verbalizer: Case of Lexeme Iodine as a Marker of Disease and War

The relationship between increased frequencies of a concept in discourse and globally significant events may reflect its connection with speakers' emotional engagement. Emotionally relevant markers can be implicitly associated with an underlying concept, thereby concealing the experienced emotion. The verbaliser iodine can act as an indirect verbaliser of the concepts of DISEASE and WAR, which are commonly associated with fear. The article illustrates a statistical approach to processing data of the lexeme iodine / йод frequency in internet text corpora in English (USA) and Ukrainian (Ukraine). To demonstrate the relevance of an indirect concept verbaliser and its connection with socio-historical context – in this case, the relationship between the increased frequency of the concept verbaliser iodine and globally relevant events, such as a pandemic, war, or a nuclear power plant accident – a statistical significance test is applied.